Spanish Vocabulary Learning Using Mnemonics

Foreign language acquisition is a mammoth task for anyone serious about it. According to some estimates, a person has to learn 3,000 words before they can read and speak at a high school level.

Luckily, there are established psychological techniques that can make the task of foreign language acquisition easier.

A mnemonic is an artificial memory device that facilitates recall of a unit of information. Most people are familiar with the mnemonic ROY G. BIV for the colours of the rainbow, but mnemonics can be used for almost anything.

Essentially what a mnemonic does is minimise the amount of brain space that has to be used to store a piece of information. This is achieved by creating an associative link between the information that has to be remembered and some information that has already been committed to long-term memory.

Mnemonics are especially useful for memorising foreign language vocabulary.

To give an example, the Spanish word for the emotion 'bitter' is 'amargado'. If you image Marge Simpson biting into a lemon and making a bitter face, you have created a visual associative link between these two words.

Then, to recall the Spanish word for 'bitter', it's simply a matter of recalling the image and then decoding it.

This sounds like a lot of work, but the beauty of mnemonics is that they mostly work on a subconscious level, so that after a few repetitions the learner does not need to recall the context of the word to recall the word itself. Your conscious mind creates the link; your unconscious mind stores and recalls it.

If this sounds unbelievable, just try recalling the Spanish word for 'bitter' in a few days, or even weeks. I bet you can do it.

The power of mnemonic learning can be applied to other elements of foreign language learning. People in the Western world are conditioned to associate the colour blue with masculine and the colour red with feminine. This can be applied to learning the gender of words in Spanish.

For example, the Spanish word for 'ear' is 'la Oreja'. Imagine a ray from the Sun striking a person in the ear, turning it red. Red and ray equals la Oreja.

A third way that mnemonics are useful for foreign language learning is to encode suffixes as part of the visual image.

For example, many Spanish words begin with the suffix 'des-'. If you know someone named 'Des', that's perfect, but otherwise you can imagine one. I like to imagine a shady character with dark eyes and a pencil moustache.

If you want to remember that a word begins with the suffix 'des-', just imagine the character Des as part of the mnemonic. The Spanish word for 'unknown' is 'desconocido'. Just imagine Des looking at a coconut with a face painted on it, and Des says "This coconut is unknown to me."

Using mnemonics in the matter described in this article can slash the amount of time needed to learn an adequate foreign language vocabulary.

Vince McLeod runs a database of spanish mnemonics that aims to give language students an easy way to learn the thousands of words needed to become fluent.

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